Tag Archives: particles

In a recent article, I mentioned how the particle を (wo or o) is usually not used in combination with other particles, except for “をも” (wo mo) which you can occasionally see in literature. However I came across another combination involving を I wanted to talk about, just to set the record straight: をば (wo… Read More »

I’ve dedicated a great deal of my time to having a good understanding of Japanese grammar, and proper usage of the particles “wa” and “ga” is one of the tricker areas. I’ve written some posts on this topic, and you can find many others if you google around. I am not going to go into a… Read More »

Japanese particles can be tricky because of their many usages and combinations. For example 「で」 can be seen with other particles in the two-particle pair 「では」or 「での」 or even in the 4-particle combination 「ならではの」. On the other hand, the 「を」 particle (written as ‘wo’ or just ‘o’), is one of the most straightforward to learn.… Read More »

One of the tricky things about running a language-learning blog is deciding what to write about. When I first started this blog back in December 2013, I mostly intended to act as support for those learning Japanese without necessarily getting too involved into detailed explanations about fundamental grammar structures that might already be covered elsewhere in… Read More »

Due to a request from one of my readers, in this post I’ll be talking about the Japanese expression “to mo” (とも), which has a variety of uses. First, “to mo” can be used to mean the particle “to” along with the particle “mo”. I won’t be going over either of these particles in great… Read More »

In a recent post I discussed how I had seen a phrase “Advilがありますか?” (“Advil ga arimasus ka?”) in a book, and upon further research confirmed it was not a natural usage of the particle “ga”. I had posted to Oshiete Goo and received an excellent response which discussed why it was unnatural. Since then, I’ve… Read More »

In this post I’m going to go over the Japanese particle “さ” (sa) and a few related words. さ is something that took me quite some time to understand, partially because it wasn’t emphasized in any of the textbooks I originally learned Japanese from. I understand authors deciding to avoid this word because it not used very… Read More »

The Japanese particle で is one of the first particles that is typically taught, because it’s usage to mean where an action takes place, or “by means of” is pretty easy to understand. Here is one example of each: 僕は部屋でテレビを見た。 I watched TV in the room. 僕たち、バスで海に行った。 We went to the beach via bus. One… Read More »

Often Japanese particles can be combined, with this example of 4 particles sandwiched together (ならではの) one of the most extreme cases. Usually the meaning of combining two or more particles can be partially guessed by thinking of it as a sum of the meanings of each particle, but there is often some extra nuance that creeps in.… Read More »

In this post I’d like to look at the particle combination で＋は = では (pronounced ‘de wa’) and the related word じゃ (ja). To a certain extent, the various usages of “では”can be understood by taking a sum of the usages of で and は when used separately, but in some cases thinking in this… Read More »